Campaigns & Elections

On Thursday, NBC’s Today and CBS This Morning joined ABC’s Good Morning America in promoting Donald Trump questioning Ted Cruz being a natural born U.S. citizen. On Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie proclaimed: “Donald Trump is escalating his attacks on Republican rival Ted Cruz, reiterating questions about the Texas senator's eligibility to run for president. And now another prominent Republican…

In 2011 and 2012, the journalists at Good Morning America railed against birther claims relating to Barack Obama, assailing the conspiracy theory as “bizarre” and “nonsense.” Yet, the same program lacked outrage on Thursday as Donald Trump promotes a form of birtherism against Ted Cruz. 

Someone remind me: isn't there a term for people with this sort of fixation? Joe Scarborough just can't stop looking at and talking about Marco Rubio's footwear, ever since a photo recently appeared of Rubio sporting a pair of boots. On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough repeatedly circled back to the subject, managing to work it into a number of conversations. For example, when Mika Brzezinski…

Near the top of the Wednesday monologue of his eponymous TBS show, Conan O’Brien joked that Donald Trump reminded him of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in the way he sculpts his hair and interacts with crowds. Upon pretending to form his hair into more like Trump’s, O’Brien remarked: “I like that Mussolini thing he does. He looks out at the crowd. He's got this guy on his head.”

Along with skipping on Wednesday night the successful congressional vote to repeal ObamaCare and defund Planned Parenthood, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC also declined to dedicate a second of airtime to the Canadien energy company TransCanada filing lawsuits against the Obama administration for having rejected the Keystone XL pipeline.

While interviewing Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz for the Wednesday edition of ABC’s World News Tonight, Republican campaign correspondent Tom Llamas demanded Cruz explain how he could “be a president and hate the Democrats and hate the culture of Washington so much and be effective.”

Give columnist Paul Waldman credit for coming up with a real grabber of a lead: “Get ready, America: we're about to take a long and unpleasant journey back down Bill Clinton's pants.” Less amusing is the rest of Waldman’s Monday American Prospect piece, which trashed Republicans for raising the 42nd president’s sexual behavior as an issue in the current campaign. Waldman jeered at GOPers for “…

During a segment on tonight's Hardball centered around Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders's criticism on the campaign trail that Hillary is insufficiently liberal and a flip-flopper on key issues, host Chris Matthews insisted that the architect of single-payer Hillarycare is a down the middle centrist, at worst slightly center left.

On Wednesday night, the major network evening newscasts all failed to cover the first full, successful congressional vote to repeal of ObamaCare and defund of Planned Parenthood that will go to President Obama’s desk where he’ll likely veto the measures seeking to undo his health care law and strike federal funding from the nation’s largest provider of abortions. Providing a more balanced…

Former Clinton donor George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday grilled the only serious opponent to the Democratic frontrunner. The Good Morning America co-host, who worked in the White House of Bill Clinton, peppered Bernie Sanders. He wondered, “How about this argument from Hillary Clinton yesterday? Clearly believes that she can make the pitch she's far more electable than you are.” 

In 1992, late-night TV host Arsenio Hall made a bad joke comparing the Pat Buchanan for President campaign to black-and-white Nazi footage. In 2016, the target is Ted Cruz. Alex Nazarayan, a writer for the shell of a publication branded as Newsweek, caused a Twitter frenzy when he compared Cruz to the Nazis, as captured by John Nolte at Breitbart: "Ted Cruz has a strong ground game in Iowa,"…

After having spent seven and a half minutes on Tuesday trumpeting President Obama’s executive actions on gun control, CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley eventually turned his newscast to the 2016 election and invoked Ronald Reagan in lecturing Republicans that “he wouldn't recognize the melee just four weeks before Iowa.”

Network news outlets conduct their own polls. They also bury the poll results when they don’t like them. On PBS on January 1, liberal pundit Mark Shields brought some very bad news for the Left. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found 73 percent say they want the next president to take a different approach from President Obama's. So NBC, both the creator of the poll and a relentless…

Tuesday’s editions of ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News aired nowhere near the exhaustive coverage of President Obama’s executive actions on gun control that the CBS Evening News did, but they were not short on fawning language for Obama’s “rallying cry...after years of anger and frustration” in what ABC hyped as “[t]he showdown after the President breaks down.”